Episode 13: Beanballs, Blood Feuds, and Collective Moral Responsibility (With Fiery Cushman)
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2013
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our classiest episode yet (OK, that's not saying much, but still...)--Psychologist Fiery Cushman joins us for a discussion about collective punishment and collective responsibility. We use Fiery's recent paper on the practice of "beaning" in baseball (punishing one player for a teammate's offense by throwing a 95 MPH fastball at the player's head) to illustrate the phenomenon. Is the "innocent" player being punished because he is somehow morally responsible for his teammate's offense? Or does deserve have nothing to do with it? Also in this episode: listener feedback (sort of, we're just psyched to have a Norwegian stand-up comic as a listener), and Fiery solves the 3,000 year-old problem of moral responsibility just so he can get out of Dave's hotel room.
Links
- Fiery Cushman [brown.edu]
- Beanball [wikipedia.org]
- Hatfield-McCoy Blood Feud [wikipedia.org]
- Major League (1989) [imdb.com]
- Revenge: A story of hope, by Laura Blumenfeld
- Blood Revenge, by Christopher Boehm
- "The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor." T Sommers.
- "John Kruk and Desert." [Flickers of Freedom blog post]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:06.0 | having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. |
| 0:09.4 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:16.9 | One of these days, you idiot, suck it out of yourself, to death! |
| 0:23.2 | The lady, I'm the person who spoke it! |
| 0:26.6 | Lady, you are attention! |
| 0:29.1 | Do not stand behind the curtain! |
| 0:36.1 | I'm very bad, man! |
| 0:37.6 | I'm a very good man! |
| 0:38.8 | Good! |
| 0:39.6 | Good, man! |
| 0:42.8 | Blaming contrasts and with no more brains than you have! |
| 0:46.8 | Lady, you are attention! |
| 0:49.0 | Do not stand! |
| 0:56.0 | You're a very bad man, you're a very good man, just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:04.2 | Welcome to a very bad wizard, I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. |
| 1:08.5 | And I'm David Pisaar from Cornell University. |
| 1:09.9 | That's gonna bring a visit to the mound, and Horton Wasting no time he's going to the Duke. |
| 1:20.5 | The Duke leads the league in save, strikeouts perenning, and hit Batsman. |
| 1:25.2 | This guy threw it his own kid in a father's sun game. |
| 1:30.9 | Watch this, Tamler is pointing to the bleachers, he's calling his shot. |
... |
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